Well, wait. That’s not a Godwin, for two reasons. 1) They really were fighting Hitler at the time. It’s not a Godwin if you’re talking about Hitler in context. 2) Michael Godwin hadn’t yet identified the trope.

But at the same time, kidnapping happened before there was a word for it.

Maybe we didn’t have the word kidnapping, but there has always been some form of abduction or stolen to work with.

Looks like a Godwin to me, though. Equating conspicuous consumption of fuel cruising the town with Hitler. If the fuel wasn’t available to spare, it wouldn’t have been on the market. So it’s more like US capitalism, “I’ve got mine, screw you”.

The situation was more dire in the UK than the US (read Orwell’s essays that discussed rationing during the war. He wrote during almost the entire time so you get a pretty good feel for what was going on) but wasting resourced during a total war does weaken a nation’s ability to fight.

As for the idea that there must be plenty of fuel if it’s on the market – read Orwell’s essays again on that about how the problem with capitalism is that you can end up with shortages of things that are necessary to fight a war or keep the civilian populace fed while a handful of wealthy schmucks consume as much as ever. Under capitalism or at least a least sufficiently deregulated capitalism a nation can be straining to fight a war and the capitalists can go on selling fuel to the government at a price high enough to make waging a war difficult. Or they can do what some US businesses did and actually sell things to the Nazis. In a war against the Nazis, do you really want to leave businesses free to say, sell fuel at a profit so that some civilian idiot can take a Sunday cruise rather than selling it at cost to the government so that they can actually fight a war against Hitler?

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